PHOENIX β Senate President Karen Fann said lawmakers might take new steps β possibly subpoenas and going back to court β to get information that Maricopa County officials wonβt provide about ballots and equipment.
County officials, as promised, declined to show up at a hearing Fann had called for Tuesday where she wanted them to answer questions posed by Cyber Ninjas. Thatβs the firm she hired to conduct a review of Maricopa Countyβs 2020 election returns, including its 2.1 million ballots.
County supervisors submitted written responses on Monday but said they were done answering questions in what several called a βshamββ audit. They noted that Cyber Ninjas is run by a CEO, Doug Logan, who previously said he does not believe Donald Trump lost the election.
In the end, Tuesdayβs hearing simply involved Logan and others involved in the audit telling Fann and Senate Judiciary Chairman Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, what they want to know in order to finish their report. It wasnβt a hearing in the traditional sense β only Fann and Petersen got to participate, and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee were not invited.
The event did produce one new piece of information.
Ben Cotton, founder of CyFIR, one of the subcontractors hired by Cyber Ninjas, told lawmakers he was able to locate files in election equipment that the auditors initially claimed the county deleted. He said it turns out there were duplicates in the system.
Bennett: Work set to resume Monday
Work on the audit will resume Monday at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, said Ken Bennett, the Senateβs liaison with the auditors.
The audit was supposed to be finished by the end of last week but wasnβt, so the auditors packed up all the ballots and equipment and stored them in another building because the coliseum had been promised for high school graduation ceremonies.
Fann said the auditors, denied additional answers from county officials, will proceed as best they can. βAt that point weβll figure it out,ββ she said. βWe may need to take it to another level and see if we can get them to please sit down with us.β
That opens the possibility of another subpoena, beyond the earlier ones that eventually forced the county to surrender the ballots and election equipment. That could also lead to new litigation.
βOr, the auditors will issue a report to say, βHereβs what weβve found and here are the questions that we have but we canβt seem to get answers for them,βββ Fann said.
In any event, she said, the next step after the audit would be legislative changes in election laws to deal with any issues that senators believe are weak points in the process. But that may not happen this legislative session.
Money sources still not known
One question that neither Fann nor Petersen asked of Logan is where he is getting the money to conduct the review.
Logan has long since acknowledged the audit is costing more than the $150,000 authorized by the Senate. And outside interests tied to efforts to discredit the election results have been engaged in fundraising efforts.
One site claims it already has raised more than $1.7 million toward its $2.8 million goal. That site is operated by The America Project, started by millionaire Patrick Byrne, who has said it was βa fraudulent election.ββ
Fann told Capitol Media Services on Tuesday she does not know who is providing the extra cash. βThey have told me I will get a list at the end of the audit,ββ she said, adding that once she gets it, she will make it public.
Much else discussed Tuesday was already known, such as the refusal of county officials to provide Senate auditors with the password for the highest-level access to the vote tallying machines.
βWe cannot give you a password that we do not possess any more than we can give you the formula for Coca-Cola,ββ they wrote Monday in their response. βWe do not have it; we have no legal right to acquire it; and so, we cannot give it to you.ββ
Cotton told Fann and Petersen he has been told those passwords remain in the exclusive custody of Dominion Voting Systems, which owns the equipment leased by the county.
Dominion did provide them earlier this year, not to the county but to two firms hired by the county to conduct their own forensic audits. County officials said those firms β unlike Cyber Ninjas β are both certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission as voting system testing laboratories.
County officials said even if they did have the passwords they would not turn them over. βYour chosen βauditors,β the Cyber Ninjas, are certainly many things,ββ the supervisors wrote. βBut βaccredited by the EACβ is not one of them.ββ
Internet questions
Cotton, under questioning by Petersen, said he has been certified as an expert witness in court hearings and has done highly confidential security work for private corporations.
He also disputed a county contention that providing Senate auditors with the highest-level password access would allow them to see Dominionβs proprietary βsource codeββ for how the machine operates.
What it would allow them to do, he said, is determine if any tabulators had the capability of being connected to the internet. Pro V & V, one of the companies hired by the county for its own audit, said there was no such connection, Cotton said.
βThe county, however, cannot validate or verify that there were or were not Verizon wireless cards inside those tabulators which would have, by definition, touched the internet,ββ he said. βThey canβt validate that their own policies and procedures are being carried out without the ability to validate the configurations of the systems.ββ
Nothing in Tuesdayβs hearing cleared up questions about access to the routers, essentially the equipment that directs messages and other traffic between computers.
Bennett again insisted that he was told earlier this year by Joseph LaRue, a deputy county attorney, that the routers had been removed from the system and were ready for delivery.
The current county position is that providing the routers would provide a βblueprintββ of the county computer system, which could direct criminals where to stage their hacking attacks to access confidential information and compromise law enforcement.
But Cotton said if that is true, that means the election equipment that was connected to the routers also had to be exposed to the internet.
βThatβs certainly something that we need to explore given the inconsistencies in the public statements and reports,ββ he said.
